


Trek of One Very Confused Guardian

by kuroi_atropos



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012), Star Trek, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Psychological Trauma, Slight OOC, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2017-11-23 12:14:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/622024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuroi_atropos/pseuds/kuroi_atropos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pitch curses Jack, sending him to a world where no one truly believes in magic. Shame the curse didn’t count on Jimmy Kirk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

He regarded the vast blackness with narrowed eyes, the only light a dim haze of blue from the quickly sputtering sparks that emanated from the gnarled staff clutched in his hands. 

“I think this is only fair. You fed me to my fears, I will feed you to yours,” the smarmy voice came from everywhere, making him twist in circles as he tried futilely to glimpse the Nightmare King in his realm.

There was a pounding on the stone doors separating him from the others, whose desperate shouts he could hear even over the darkly gleeful laughter that echoed around him after the mad spirit’s taunt.

“Pitch!” Jack yelled.

“I hope you enjoy a world where no one believes, Jack.”

The darkness swallowed him. 

XXXXX

Jack couldn’t be sure what woke him up, but he jolted up from the blackness of unconsciousness to a shadowy night. He bolted up and on sheer instinct of knowing Pitch had been near him when he fell, Jack scrambled on the damp ground for his staff, ignoring the mud and moss that dirtied his hands as he brushed over various branches, rocks and leaves. He finally felt his staff and let out a small sigh of relief as his fingers closed around the familiar wood. 

Jack took a closer look at his surroundings, his eyes quickly adjusting to the dimness of the forest around him, the bright moon barely glancing through dark branches stripped bare of their leaves. 

How had he gotten here? The last thing that he remembered was the cave with Pitch and the other Guardians scrambling to reach where the Nightmare King had him trapped in an intricate design of spell work on the uneven stone floor, and then….. 

Nothing. No, more like a sense of nothingness. A void.

Jack shook himself, slapping his cheeks to snap himself out of his reverie and turned around, taking a deep breath before reaching out with his senses to try and pinpoint his location. 

He allowed his presence to seep into the air, feeling for the wind and the chill of – Jack yelped, snapping his senses back into himself and falling over in shock. 

He couldn’t feel any spiritual presence at all. No response…from anything. He had to leave here now! 

“Wind! Can you hear me? I don’t care where I am, carry me home, or to North or just answer me please!” He spun around, bordering on scared as not even a slight, comforting breeze came to wrap around him. 

“WIND!” Jack howled, praying that the only thing that had been with him since he died wouldn’t abandon him.

But…. it had. 

Jack sank to his knees as he tried to think. This place, he didn’t know what was happening here. What exactly had Pitch done? He’d said something about a world where no one believed, but how could he do that? How could that happen? Jack didn’t understand—he didn’t think he could understand. How could everything be so different?

He didn’t know how long he stared at the dank ground before he looked up at the moon through the trees once again, hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the Man in the Moon. He’d never directly answered Jack before, but if something had happened in that last fight with Pitch, something that made it so that Jack didn’t deserve to be a Guardian or even a spirit (because what else could it be?)…he deserved an answer for that.

Jack could only glare at the bright orb for a few seconds before he cringed and looked away without even voicing the thoughts running through his head. The moon was more than silent… it almost seemed dead to his senses. Well, not really dead, but almost… and in every way that his heart told him mattered. 

He couldn’t put what he felt into words. He didn’t know what was happening. All he knew was that somehow the Man in the Moon wasn’t there, even though he could sense life in the bright orb.

As if the moon wasn’t disconcerting enough on its own, the animals moving about the dense foliage didn’t match what he knew either. Jack’s “Hey” to an owl didn’t even result in a twitch, and there was nothing spiritual in the other predators and prey that slinked through the woods. They were mindless….

Even the trees felt spiritually dead. And even with his staff, no matter how much power he poured into it, he couldn’t leave patterns behind on anything.

Fighting back the worry that had knotted his stomach (that was just what Pitch wanted, for Jack to fea- NO! He would not even think the word right now!), Jack finally picked a direction and started walking. He needed to find out where he was; figure out what was happening to the world. Had Pitch finally been able to beat them all? Had he somehow reached Manny? Jack made himself stop thinking as he placed one foot in front of the other, over and over again, his staff absently tapping against various objects, just so he could confirm that yes, he was still corporeal. 

After the longest walk Jack could remember taking, he stumbled out of the forest and into a clearing on a hill side. 

Below him, a city spread across a valley.

Rather than a sense of relief and happiness, Jack felt the niggling sense of fear he hadn’t been able to entirely control grow as he took in the obviously sleeping city, completely devoid of the trailing golden streams of Sandy’s Dreamsand. Even when Sandy was busy with Guardian business, there was always Dreamsand floating in cities and towns at night, bringing the children sweet dreams. 

“This is not good….” Jack muttered to himself. A slight breeze ruffled his hair as it arched up the hillside the way breezes did when they liked to play, so he tentatively tried calling out again. “Wind? Can you hear me? Are you okay? Can you answer me?” The wind seemed to linger around him a little, but nothing resolute, and there was no lilting laugh to the voice—no words or reaction—just a breeze.

Jack wrapped his arms around himself and his staff, hugging tightly for a moment as the loss of his greatest friend ripped at his soul before his eyes narrowed and he practically leapt down the hillside. He’d find something, anything…. He’d get Pitch for this as soon as he found the other Guardians or any of the other spirits that could at least point him in the right direction. 

XXXXX

Since he couldn’t even conjure a wind that would carry him to a fence top, let alone to the roofs of the buildings, Jack was reduced to hunting for signs of Sandy, or any of the others, manually. He looked down every alley for a stray flower and in every window for a fluttering fairy or grain of golden sand. 

By the time the sun started cresting over the horizon, Jack had gone from worried to downright terrified. Like most of the night, there had been nothing. Not even a hint of a Nightmare or anything more positive. 

He himself could still barely frost a window and he only succeeded if he touched it for a long time and concentrated like he had to freeze an ocean. Ice and snow were out of the question. He’d also been forced to climb buildings by hand, foot and staff. 

And the city itself… 

The cars flew where he could not. There were no newspaper stands anywhere he could see, and media bars streamed across all the buildings, talking about ships that sailed the stars. He’d heard of such things, but only in the story books Jamie had on the shelves in his room.

The toys he’d seen in several windows went beyond anything even North could cook up. He’d seen a parent slip a tooth from under a pillow (leaving a small toy in its place) rather than a fairy or a mouse. And there were no vibrations of Bunny’s warrens underground. 

After the longest night in Jack’s memory, he stared as the city came to life around him and wanted it to stop, to give him time to think, to figure out what Pitch had done.

Then, a child looking down at a glowing screen of something in his hand walked right through him, and it shook Jack to the core, devouring what little resistance to his mounting worry and fear he had left. Even with everything so different here, with no Man in the Moon, or North, or Tooth Fairy, he was still invisible. With a scream Jack flung his staff high, let loose the entirety of power inside of him, calling on all things cold with every ounce of strength he had. 

Up high in the atmosphere, a weather satellite recognized a sudden shift in barometric pressure. There had been multiple strange wind patterns in its area within the past 12 hours, which (combined with this sudden phenomenon) triggered a warning to an analyst on the Lunar colony even as the shift in temperature was suppressed and the winds encouraged along their normal, planned paths.

Down below, a broken winter spirit fell to the ground as realization sunk in. He’d gotten a few flakes of snow, and then nothing. He really had lost his ice—the cold that had never ignored him the way the rest of the world did. So he sat there on the perfect sidewalk, staring at the ground and cried tears that didn’t even freeze when they hit the pavement.

XXXXX

112 Years Later

James T. Kirk found himself in the unusual position of pinning his Chief Engineer and main Navigator with an incredulous stare. 

Normally Jim had no concerns with the experiments that his crew, especially his Senior Staff, wanted to do. However in this instance, his First Officer was looking at the two other geniuses with both eyebrows raised in Spock’s Expression #12 (WTF? You are seriously lacking in common sense—or a brain—right now). He trusted his First Officer to understand the science talk that managed to escape his comprehension and give him a heads up if whatever was going on needed to be halted, and this particular Spock Expression definitely had blinking, glowing, arrows pointing at a ‘Stop’ sign. 

It was mainly due to this almost extreme look from his first officer that he doubted the practice in trans-dimensional transport stuff (he had gotten a bit lost after they stopped talking about the actual modifications and moved into the theoretical calculations) would go off without a hitch as Scotty and Chekov had claimed. 

“Scotty, you still haven’t found Archer’s beagle,” Jim pointed out.

“Oh, aye Captain. But this might actually help! See we have this theory-”

“I can assure you that modifying an ionic field to work in conjunction with the transporters to bypass certain barriers to th-” Spock started only to actually be interrupted by Chekov. 

“But Commander!” Kirk blinked while Spock re-raised the one eyebrow that had lowered as the Vulcan had transitioned into lecture mode. “We’ve modeled several simulations based on the instances related by The Ambassador!” Kirk sighed as Spock’s eyes narrowed into Spock Expression #3 (you are this close to being nerve pinched) at the crew’s capitalized moniker for the older Spock that had come through the Black Hole and the three super geniuses started off into a debate on the merits of experimenting with the transporters.

That a future version of Spock kept butting into Federation Politics and Sciences had to be one of the worst kept secrets Jim had ever seen since his attempts at hiding his less than legal mischief as a kid. The older man had little to no compunction when it came to meddling with the Universe he found himself in, especially while it concerned the Senior Staff of the Enterprise and several of the frankly weird dangers they’d apparently run into in the man’s original Universe. 

Kirk felt fairly sure some things wouldn’t happen due to the altered world they found themselves in, but he knew several things seemed to be unavoidable. From a challenge standpoint he couldn’t be sure if he was happy about most likely missing the Borg and Dominion or not.

Still some of the crazier stuff, like mirror universes, had frankly fascinated all of them, especially with the possibilities raised by Nero’s intervention alone. 

This interest in alternate realities was, for the most part, a good thing, and they’d had some great successes in using slightly modified com signals to help speed communications, but Jim was, well, leery to say the least about them doing anything with the transporters.

“-and see! We have this built up which shows-” Kirk focused back on the conversation to watch as Scotty plopped the device he’d been fiddling with on the Captain’s desk. Kirk poked at it with a stylus, running the shape through all the designs that had crossed his desk and after coming up blank, he had to interrupt.

“Scotty, I thought that we agreed you wouldn’t actually build any prototypes until I signed off on them after that thing with the pink trees.” The Scotsman flushed a little, and Chekov laughed as he remembered the incident that had Scotty hiding in the Jeffries Tubes for weeks from a bunch of the science department and one pissed off helmsman. 

“Well, Captain, this isn’t a prototype exactly…. This little thing isn’t compatible with any of the ships systems, we didn’t even want to bother you and the Commander if we couldn’t even generate the type of Ion field we needed, since Ion technology is something we haven’t played with much.” 

“Da, Captain! Not a prototype since it will not be used with the transporters for testing at all!” Chekov said cheerfully. 

Jim sighed and poked the device with his stylus again, only to have Spock actually slap it away with Expression #2 (you’re acting idiotic again, Captain) on his face. “Until we can verify the safety of the device, Captain, I would advise against jostling the unit unnecessarily.” 

“If it wasn’t stable, Scotty and Chekov wouldn’t be slinging it around, right guys?” Jim smiled up past his First Officer at the two who nodded emphatically.

“Oh, aye, Lad!” Scotty smiled, “we would nae wanna risk the Commander lynching us if anything happened to you, sir.” 

Jim felt the urge to drag his hand over his face, refusing to look at his First Officer. 

“Okay. If this doesn’t work with the transporters, what exactly does it do?” 

“Well, basically it’ll generate a type Ion field that’ll let us modify certain beam types through it and if that works, we can try it on the transporters! On its own it doesn’t really impact anything, see!” Before Kirk or Spock could say or do anything, Scotty pressed a button on the machine and a high pitched whine drowned out everything in his ready room, startling him into jumping back from his desk and knocking his chair over. 

“Hey, watch it Jimmy!” A young voice came from behind him. Kirk spun, banging into his desk as Spock and the others started, his first officer going so far as to grab his shoulder and yank him bodily over the desk with his more than human strength. Pads and various office toys scattered to the floor from the force of him being dragged through them, and he kicked out to help push himself the rest of the way off the desk to stand beside Spock, ignoring the pain in his hip where it had connected with the edge of his desk. 

Leaning in the corner, glaring down at Jim’s fallen chair with a half-annoyed, half- worried expression, was an outline of a thin, humanoid figure. It slowly filled in before their eyes, gaining color as if the figure was having its transparency adjusted on a screen. Even after it filled out, the character appeared to be deathly pale, like a corpse frozen in the cold of space given life. It had the form of a human teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen at the oldest, with ice white hair. It dressed in rough-hewn pants with twine wrapped around the bottoms holding the fabric tight against its legs, well up from dainty, bare feet, and a blue hoodie with nearly glowing metallic silver threads shot through it in the shape of stylized frost patterns and snowflakes. 

Kirk blinked, recognizing a feeling of familiarity that solidified when the figure glanced up, and blue eyes a few shades icier than his own orbs looked on his rather blindly. Kirk spun to glare at his Chief Engineer and Navigator. “Damn it, Scotty! How did this stupid machine get inside my head?”

The two human geniuses looked torn between shrinking back from Kirk’s unusual ire and jumping in front of him to protect him from the mysterious new stranger. 

“Captain?” Spock asked, almost tentatively. Kirk eyed his First Officer who had yet to look away from the teen, but he knew the Vulcan enough to tell that Spock was itching to call Security. 

“Spock, meet Jack Frost, my childhood imaginary friend.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please tell me what you think of the story! C&C very welcome! :) Also I am pretty new to AO3 so if I messed up the formatting/tags/etc. I'd love a heads up.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pitch curses Jack, sending him to a world where no one truly believes in magic. Shame the curse didn’t count on Jimmy Kirk.

_89 Years After Arrival_

_Jimmy sat at the edge of the lake on his Grampa Bear's farm, looking over the silver water. It had been cold enough lately that the surface was caked with a thin sheet of ice and glittered brightly in the early morning sun. With a sigh he dug a stone out from the slightly frozen mud right at the edge, uncaring of how his actions dirtied the nice white shirt and black suit jacket Ms. Tara had put him in earlier. Jimmy took careful aim and chucked the smoothed stone across the lake, watching as it skittered across the ice to hop the other bank and land right at the base of the tree with the ancient tire swing on it._

_He clambered to his knees and started digging out another stone. It was a little different then skipping stones on the lake when it wasn't frozen, not as fun, but it was close enough for Jimmy right now._

_It took a while and his fingers were practically frozen from the cold dirt but he managed to amass a pretty nice pile of rocks, and swiftly set about chucking them across the lake just like Grampa Bear taught him not even three months ago. Jimmy knew it was not even three months because Grampa Bear had taught him how to mark days off on the old fashioned paper calendar that was hung up by magnets on the fridge. Jimmy liked the calendar, and skipping stones, and the way Grampa Bear smiled at him when he figured things out really fast._

_Jimmy chucked the next stone hard enough it actually chipped the ice on its first bounce. Sometimes he really didn't like figuring things out._

_It made people look at you funny, even when they cooed at how "smart" he was and how he should "move up" to be with a class of bigger kids that liked to tease him even if they weren't really mean about it._

_And it let him figure out that since four days ago, he was all alone. Four days ago (he still marked the calendar like a good boy) his Grampa Bear had clutched his chest and Jimmy knew to get the little bottle of pills and make sure Grampa Bear ate one while he tried to call 911 like they told all the kids in movies and school. The lady had been nice to Jim even as she asked for addresses and told him what to do, but it wasn't enough._

_Jimmy knew from the sad looks the man and lady gave him that his Grampa was gone just like his Daddy and would never come back. He could figure out that even though everyone was telling how it was "fine" and that Jimmy and Sam would be taken care of, nothing would be okay._

_Mommy wasn't coming home even though Grampa was gone, to the obvious surprise of everyone who had flocked to the house the last few days (a lot were in the uniforms that Mommy wore and that Grampa Bear was in when he was sealed into the casket). No one had believed that Old Tiberius Kirk would ever die, especially while he had Jimmy to look after._

_Jimmy could have told them that that didn't matter if they had only asked, after all it hadn't stopped Daddy from leaving. He had figured out a long time ago that was why looking at him made Mommy sad. Jimmy made her think of Daddy and that he was gone. That was why he stayed at Grampa Bear's a lot even when Mommy was on Earth and Sammy got to stay with her._

_He had figured it out ages ago though that he was better off with Grampa Bear anyway. Grampa Bear kept letting him call him Grampa Bear even though he could now say both Grandpa and Tiberius just fine. Grampa Bear told him stories of all the wonders of the universe, read him tales from actual paper books that he said were read to him when he was little, played knights and dragons with him, cops and robbers, helped him set traps for Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy (she was especially tricky, the glue wasn't even touched!) Jimmy had learned that there was always something out there, and learned that no matter what, Jimmy's Daddy was gone because he had loved Jimmy even more than Grampa Bear did._

_And knowing that, Jimmy knew that even if he figured out that everything wasn't okay, that in spite of whatever weird looks he got, even if he had to put up with Ms. Tara's sickeningly sad looks and Sammy's exasperation with the farm not having the latest holo technology and the condescending man in the suit that was trying to figure out who would take care of them until Mommy got back, Jimmy believed that there were amazing things out there, and that he was cared about, and protected._

_Jimmy smiled for the first time in four days, and chucked the last rock across the lake, only to jump to his feet in shock as a pained yelp came from the bushes the rock jumped the bank into. A teenage boy with weird white hair in an old fashioned blue hoodie holding a twisted looking wood staff popped out of the bushes, rubbing his arm and scowling down at where Jimmy guessed the rock was._

_"Watch it, kid! Those things aren't exactly snowballs!"_

XXXXX

_112 Years After Arrival_

Jim was rather proud to have created a new expression on his First Officer's face, maybe he should name it 'you have obviously suffered a mental break' – nah…. That didn't quite fit….. He'd have to revisit this when he could concentrate on it more.

"Imaginary friend?" Spock asked with a slightly hesitant tone as he gazed at the figure (that didn't seem to realize it had been called on or introduced however flippantly).

Jim nodded, staring at the figure poking the fallen chair with his gnarled, hooked staff. "Yeah, it's a common mechanism for kids, human ones anyway. Sometimes they create a psychological construct to help deal with things. I had one until I turned 13, and somehow you're looking at him." He waved his hand to the teen that had obviously grown bored with the chair and had turned his attention to the desk, jumping up to sit on the false wood with one leg hanging down as he stared at one of Jim's personal pads that had been left on (the one showing the lightsaber schematics he'd been toying with in his off hours).

"Aw man, you're still on actually making one of these light swords, Jimmy?" the boy said almost resignedly. "I know that you really wanted one but you do remember the terror of your last attempt, right? I mean, not only did you knock me out for a week from dampening that blast but Mike couldn't regrow his eyebrows for a year and John was singing soprano for at least two months…."

Jim blushed as the others stopped ogling the zoned out figure on his desk and gawked at him questioningly. "I was 15 and in a bad spot and they gave me the parts knowing _full well_ what I would do with them, I _swear_!"

Chekov laughed and Scotty grinned widely while Spock adopted Expression #6 (I am sure that you believe that completely incorrect information and as such I will only hold it against you marginally.)

"This science stuff is interesting and all but, Jimmy, it's been days! When are you going to be done talking to them so you can check if you got another mission or something that involves another planet that you get to take a shuttle to and…wait, why have you all stopped talking? Did someone come in when I didn't notice?" The boy looked up from the pad suddenly as he finally seemed to realize that no one had said a word and noted that they were all staring at him. "What are you all looking at?" The boy scrambled off of the table, staff held in a slightly defensive position as he whirled to face the corner of the room that he had previously been leaning in.

Jim blinked.

"No weird clouds or lights…no other people…nothing looks funny…well, funnier…" the boy muttered as poked his stick at the wall a few times before turning in a circle slowly, eyes scouring the room.

Jim blinked again.

"Dang, Jimmy, I can't see what you guys do this time. Which I'll grant is a switch." That was followed by what could only be described as a cautious twirl as the being kept looking around curiously. "Ugh, I hope it's not something with those wave length things that you tried to explain once? Or was it the fields?" While the staff stayed steady, the boy continued to turn in a circle. After a few rotations one of his hands lifted and tugged at his hair sharply. "Or was it field beams? You know I can never remember. I wish you'd slow down sometimes, you don't much lately. Rats. How do I let you know what I'm not seeing Jimmy? After that thing with the rocks and Ensign Mathers I'm nowhere near strong enough to mess with one of your computer pad thingies…."

Jim's eyes widened and shot over to Spock who inclined his head momentarily, acknowledging the mention that would need clarification later. He did remember something about how on the last away mission, when Mathers had been caught in rock slide, he had miraculously come out with only a few scrapes and a sprained ankle. The part that intrigued Jim the most on that, was that she had sworn up and down that she'd felt something push her out of the way of the thickest part of the rock fall.

If this being had been following them that long, well, Jim needed more information on the boy twirling in front of him.

"Hmm…. Seriously, what are you doing just staring at whatever it is? Aren't you going to do something so I know what's got you so distracted? You're getting slow Jimmy, come on!" In an almost absent gesture the boy stopped spinning and reached out towards Jim as if to poke him with the staff.

In an instant Spock had himself in between his captain and the boy, forcing Jim back (yelling indignant protests, of course), while Scotty nailed the panic button on the wall and Chekov dove for one of the (visible) phasers that were stashed in the Captain's office in case of (all too frequent in his opinion) boarding and pointing it at Jack.

The boy cocked his head, looking around again as he shifted, nimbly stepping to the side of the desk with his staff out and turning a complete 180 from Chekov's dead center aim to look behind him. "Thanks for the direction finally, Pavel. Where are you whatever you are? I want a whack at you before Jimmy's security beats you to a pulp and Spock nerve pinches you! Note to self, I still have got to learn to do that."

"Excuse me," Jim said to the boy's back, pushing his First Officer aside a little. For some reason, he felt just a bit disturbed that this version of his imaginary friend didn't seem to realize they were looking at him. Jack had always tried to hide it from Jimmy, but he remembered how much it had hurt the winter spirit when no one paid attention to him (and Jim seriously didn't want to analyze what that said about the "trauma" he'd been dealing with as a kid, thank you very much). He stepped forward towards the boy, staying out of Checkov's line of fire and shaking off Spock's grabbing hand.

The boy didn't even look at Jim, so he tried again.

"Excuse me, but I'd appreciate it if you would you turn around and face us, please. I'd love to know how you got in my office."

"Yeah whatever you are, turn and face the brat, would ya?" the white-haired kid echoed tightly.

Jim had blinked. "We're actually talking to you. Why do you look like him? Like Jack Frost?"

The utter stillness that took over the boy at that was absolute. Not a twitch or tremor, no words…

Then Security rushed into the room (his internal clock gave him a count on the response time, oh the drills they would be going through) and joined Chekov in pointing phasers at this manifestation of his one-time friend. At the swish of the doors heralding his Security, the boy spun and he stumbled back, falling into the wall, his staff clutched to his chest with white fingers and his skin paling even more.

"You're not talking to me," he whispered, sounding almost desperate. "Y-you can't be! You haven't seen me for so long, Jimmy…. Who are you talking to? It's not fair!" His eyes turned to blue fire and he whirled around jerkily again and again, eyes searching frantically. "Whoever you are I'll turn you into a sculpture for pretending to be me! It's bad enough that…don't you dare do this! I'll freeze you inch by inch so bad that you'll scream and beg for the mercy of Pitch's nightmares!"

Jim's eyes narrowed, and with one hand he waved off Spock while he took a deep breath and carefully reached up to grasp the staff so like the one he remembered from his childhood. When his hand came into contact with the wood, stopping the shaking of the staff, the boy froze, still as a winter morning just before dawn.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the boy turned to face him, eyes meeting his only a little less blindly than they had moments before. Jim couldn't help but smile at the site of Jack looking so scattered, though he knew this couldn't be real. Imaginary friends didn't come back as real beings other people could see years later. "I am talking to you, and to me—to us—you look like Jack Frost."

'Jack' seemed as if he wanted to faint.

"Y-you said…." He faded off and they stood, locked in this tableau for seconds that stretched into eternity. Then Jack pulled the staff out of Jim's hand, jerking as if he'd been burned, and darted back into the corner, looking absolutely terrified as he slid trembling to the floor and curled into a tight ball, muttering hurriedly. "No! Not real…you're imagining things again…. Wake up, Jack! Stop doing this to yourself! Jimmy can't see you, hasn't since that awful place, and you know it! You may be stupid enough to follow him still but you know he can't see you…he doesn't believe!"

The boy buried his heads in his crossed arms, the staff sliding to clatter quietly on the floor next to him. Jim couldn't quite make out the words the boy spoke after that, but he could guess that they were much more of the same.

Jim turned Spock for help, just a little lost on just how to proceed. He knew how to take care of intruders and he knew how to take care of traumatized kids, but he wasn't quite sure what to do when they were the same person. Spock just looked back at him with one eyebrow raised barely above the other and a particular tilt to his mouth, or Expression #7 (In this rare instance I believe you are more likely to come up with a satisfactory solution as this is too emotional for me to work with). Jim did not like that expression. He glanced at the other crew members in the room. Chekov seemed like he wanted to give the kid a hug while Scotty looked, well, like he understood all too well and empathized. The security officers were obviously trying to remain tough but even their stern images had frayed a little at the edges.

Jim was just about ready to decide to screw the rules and try to comfort the kid when a loud commotion in the hallway drew their attention.

"Oughtta my way! I don't hear shooting and I am going to take that idiotic kid that plays at Captain to task for scaring us all to death!" Jim turned to see his security quickly decide that a cowering kid was less of an immediate danger than CMO on a war path and moved out of the Doctor's way while trying to maintain a line of sight on the boy. Not an easy task and Jim would have found their antics rather funny if it weren't for the fact that he happened to be the object of Bones' ire.

Crap.

XXXXX

Bones stared at the shivering, terrified child in the corner and then at all the slightly guilty looking people pointing phasers at said boy, followed by a glare he sent at Jim and Spock (who frankly looked like gob smacked idiots) before he sighed.

"I would think that just one of you could cover a kid! The rest of you, out!" The security officers all turned to glance at him, then back at the Captain unsurely so McCoy raised his voice a little for the next one. "Out!" He barked with a promise of extra physicals in his glare. They didn't need any more motivation. With some quick shuffling all the security officers, with the exception of 'Cupcake' (as Jim still called him), vacated the Captain's Office. Satisfied, Bones then checked over the other three members of the Senior Staff, who seemed more than happy to allow him to deal with the kid. Of course. With a roll of his eyes, Bones took a few steps closer until he was just out of arms reach of the shaking boy.

Kneeling slowly until he was mostly on the kid's current level, Bones settled himself in for a long wait.

It took a while for the shivering to slow, long enough in fact that Bones had begun to run through a list of sedatives while trying to figure out which would be least likely to hurt the kid. Based on his coloring he most likely wasn't human. Could he be part Andorian? Or maybe some other species? The hair coloring was too natural to be dyed, and nothing that wasn't visible from Bones distance would add that subtle of a blue pigment to the kid's skin without some serious surgery time which no doctor in good conscience would do to anyone that young; so many variables.

But surely enough, the trembling slowly ended.

By the time the youngster had stopped quivering completely Bones' knees were starting to ache, but he knew that proximity was important and wouldn't risk startling the kid by shifting. Couldn't let him think Bones was moving away, but wouldn't put him on the defensive by inching closer.

They stayed that way for a bit longer (ouch), and he couldn't quite glance over his shoulder to see what was happening as he heard near silent shifting. Finally, just when McCoy thought that the kid might have passed out, the boy's head eased up just enough that a sliver of blue eyes became visible over the crossed arms and focused on the doctor. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Jim had come to stoop next to him, which caused the eyes to flick and focus on him like a laser.

The ice-blue eyes watched Jim warily, a type of desertion, loneliness and disbelief visible in them that had Bones parental instincts and ER experience aching to hug so tight that ribs cracked.

"Okay, so I think that we got off on the wrong foot, and I am sorry for that," Jim said, his voice even and low. "We were startled and confused by you appearing out of nowhere like that." A full body flinch from the tightly balled figure in the corner accompanied the end of that second sentence and McCoy blinked as he processed that, fitting a possible reason in with what little he'd seen so far and trying to come up with more likely scenarios based on the fact that the kid was not only on the ship but in the Captain's suite.

"I said something wrong again, didn't I?" Jim asked, voice at the same calm level. "I do that a lot, you know, stick my foot in my mouth since I talk so fast and so much." That brought a slight, kind of faraway smile to the boys pale lips. "This is a little weird for me, right now. And I seem to be at a bit of a disadvantage. You obviously know me, which is great! It means I don't have to bore you with my life story," he continued with a bright, megawatt grin that Bones knew he only used on potential one-night stands and reporters he'd been ordered to make nice with, and now apparently traumatized children that also happened to be a security breach.

The result was a bit more solid of a grin on its target and a mouth moving a little, as if the boy wanted to speak but couldn't quite bring himself to.

Jim waited a few moments, to see if the boy would pick up the courage to respond before he eventually continued. "Since you know me, you know that unless you hurt my friends or someone I need to protect, I'm generally a nice guy, right?" A tentative nod came, and even if it was coupled with a look of expectant failure. Bones couldn't help but give an internal sigh of relief. The kid was responding well enough, not completely catatonic….

"I'm glad you agree," Jim said, with that bright smile getting a little bigger. The shocked, barely hopeful look on the kids face, in Bones' humble opinion, was considerably more amazing. "So I think, that if you'll let me have a do over on that first question, I would like to ask are you okay, right now? Is there anything that I or my crew can do to help?" Jim raised his palm just a little, palm up in the boy's direction, as if offering a hand up if the boy wanted. The boy sat their stunned for a moment, before ever so warily reaching out his own hand, blue eyes trailing after it as it tapped Jim's hand experimentally looking with a kind of flabbergasted joy when the hand touched. The boy's eyes flew up to Jims, looking as he had been given the world. For a tense moment, nothing happened, and then the blue eyes suddenly broke, shattering into tears with a loud, aching howl of a sob as he threw himself at Jim, clutching at the Captain as if he were afraid the other would disappear at any moment.

As Jim carefully wrapped the boy in his arms, holding him as he choked and wept into his gold uniform top, he looked up to Bones with a dangerous glint to his eye, and glanced over his shoulder at Spock who nodded. Then the first officer dragged Scotty, Chekov and a silently protesting Cupcake out of the room with one last glance at the device on the Captain's desk and a look that meant the laws of physics and the universe in general were about to get re-written.

XXXXX

Jim stared at the bed across the Sick Bay. It currently held their unconscious stowaway/intruder/whatever he was. Jim wasn't even sure how to start writing his report on this to command, having had no time to question the boy since as soon as the kid had stopped crying into Jim's shirt, Scotty's device had started sparking.

The boy had drawn in, seizing Jim even tighter to himself and screaming in pain.

Jim had had to shout orders to Spock and Scotty over the rush of so many bodies barreling into his office in result, asking if he was alright (now that he thought about it, the boy really did sound like him). While his First Officer and Chief Engineer had gotten the device working again, there had been a moment when the device shut off completely, and the being that looked so much like his Jack disappeared, causing shouts of surprise from his security and Jim fall back and crab walk away from the area a little in shock.

Then the machine cut in again and the boy was there, right where Jim had apparently left him, eyes wide, locked on him with what he could only term as betrayal before another painful jolt seized the boy after another quickly quelled spark fit and he finally collapsed into unconsciousness.

In the year and a half that he had been Captain, their crew had run into some truly strange stuff at the direction of an Ambassador Spock prodded Starfleet. They'd seen nearly omnipotent beings, wonders of science, cultures that gave new definition to the word 'strange', and made all sorts of discoveries even the Old Man with all his experience in what could (had?) happen marvel. He'd been thinking over what the Ambassador had told them of their other-selves adventures, and he was sure that wandering across a version of his childhood friend had never been mentioned. He couldn't help but wonder if any other versions of him had had something like this happen. He snorted a little and ran his hands over his face roughly, trying to snap himself out of it. Most of the other hims were probably so perfect and popular and loved and un-messed up that an imaginary friend was a ludicrous idea.

"I don't like that look, kid," Bones grumped from his left, and Jim smiled at his best friend.

"You don't like most of my looks, Bones." The Doctor tilted his head in acquiescence as he too turned to look at the mystery patient. "What are you picking up from him?"

"It's weird, Jim." Jim arched an eyebrow at him. "I know, I know…. Not much but, you remember that world with the telepaths, how they tried to fool us with the info on the scanners and the fake survivors camp before they realized that we knew everything?"

Jim nodded, thinking back on one of the first missions that the Old Man had finagled Starfleet into sending them on, and thinking on how Talosians had tried to integrate the crash survivor Vina to the crew. With the species' general love of learning and wish to gain new experiences, they were quickly being assimilated nicely into the diplomatic corps and some of the exploratory crews as much as their physical frailties would allow. There had been some initial trouble as they worked out what was appropriate to collect and what wasn't, but Jim still counted that one as a win in stabilizing the wounded Federation. Still they did occasionally manage to weird Jim out with their lack of privacy rules, and he wasn't a fan of how they occasionally got distracted or forgot that they were around a psy-null species and made him hallucinate.

"Well, it's a bit like that. Our instruments can tell that something is there, but nothing matches like I expect it to. The sensors read him as room temp even though when I touch him he's colder than a sick Vulcan. I can feel what seems like a rather slow heartbeat, but we don't register a pulse. We can get a general pattern in the head area that seems like brain activity, but if we hook him up directly it tells us he's a vegetable. It's like he's there but not. The only thing I can think of is trying to mess with that ion thing, but unless we need to I ain't willing to do that since it causes the kid so much pain."

Jim nodded. Weird actually seemed to sum that up nicely. "What about his staff and clothes? You heard from Spock on those yet?"

"The hobgoblin hasn't come out of M'Benga's office yet," Bones said with a scowl, pointing to the side office that Spock had taken over as a mini lab when it became apparent they couldn't separate the items from the device.

Jim had to sigh at the thought of dealing with his two closest friends after they had been forced by the device's limited range and the propensity of the Boy's clothes and staff to disappear if taken too far away from it to share space and resources.

He couldn't wait for Scotty and Chekov to finish rigging a few more of those devices.

"Grand."

The two stood there a bit longer. Jim knew he should start trying to make enough sense of this to report, but he was still glued to the image of one of his only childhood friends laying still as death on the bio-bed, dwarfed by the red hospital gown that Bones' scarily efficient nursing staff had changed the kid into.

"Captain." Jim turned to look at Janice Rand, blond hair in her normal intimidating updo. His Yeoman was holding out at pad to him that had a flashing message in lovely priority red. Oh the timing…

He took the pad with a quick thanks, and after glancing at the privacy setting, met Bones eyes gleefully. Then he smirked evilly, and darted into the man's office calling out his security overrides, causing it to shut despite the doctor's cursing and waving fist in the range of the motion detectors. He loved taking over Bones' office for legitimate reasons that the man couldn't do anything about other than gripe. Just the thought of Bones locked on the other side of the doors made him smile despite knowing that the message was most likely going to order them to a really sucky mission.

Jim placed his hand against the pad and after a quick scan the message opened, showing Admiral Bartlett. Jim scowled.

"Captain Kirk. On behalf of Starfleet Command, congratulations on successfully finding a rich Dilithium source for the Federation." Yeah, yay for managing to successfully complete the mission despite the initial surveys not showing the instability of the region, Jim thought meanly as the list of injured crewman and damaged equipment from the last Away Mission ran through his head. It taught him the lesson to always triple check the stupid prelim reports as their little trip had come a tad too close to killing his people (especially Mathers) for Jim's liking.

"Your next mission to New Vulcan has been reassigned to the Lexington. We are placing you on a priority mission instead." The Admiral's hand twitched and a star chart with a blinking red light took over the screen along with a side bar of sensor readings.

"We have detected some unusual readings near the Klingon Boarder, and your ship is being tasked with investigating it. The signatures vaguely resemble those given to us by the Ambassador as early Romulan Cloaking Technology."

Kirk scowled. Oh yeah….. Sucky.

"We know for a fact that the Narada was being held by the Klingons prior to the attack." Oh yeah, and that point had been tricky for the politicians to deal with, if the Klingons had been up front with the Federation, Vulcan might have been saved and the Kelvin avenged. Jim still wasn't sure what to think about that privately although he toed the Federation line in front of the cameras. "While we are fairly confident that their claims of not being able to reverse engineer the future technology are accurate, if this is them taking the first steps into being able to use Cloaks, we want to know and we want it shut down, now."

Jim had no particular issues with that.

"Stick to our side of the Border unless absolutely necessary. If you are forced to cross, under no circumstances get caught. Relationships are tense right now and the last thing we need is what could be seen as an aggressive act putting fuel on the fire. Given the delicate nature of this situation you will have a cover mission announced to general crew for use with any inquiring parties. You'll be doing check-ins with these frontier colonies near the Border region in question."

Three green lights appeared in the general vicinity of the blinking red lights.

"One is a week behind on a 3 month check in, and the other 2 are due for their annual infrastructure review."

The star charts disappeared. "All appropriate information on the cover mission will be forwarded as per normal at your next subspace exchange. An in-depth packet on the sensor readings will be waiting under standard encryptions in that data dump and you are cleared to share anything that has been discussed in this briefing with members of your senior staff only, and after that only as absolutely needed.

Good luck."

The Admiral nodded to him after a final farewell and the message ended. Kirk scowled, perfect. Just what he needed when they were dealing with another unprecedented experience. Klingons….

Suddenly a crash came from outside of Bones' office and, after wiping the pad, Jim jumped up and rushed out into Sickbay. Rand quickly took the pad from him and at his nod started the standard practice to completely eliminate the message from the easily stolen pad. A back up copy of the orders would be on Kirk's office computer, but the Federation felt it was better to be safer than sorry with the less encrypted pads and dangerous info.

Once that was taken care of, Jim took in the sickbay and saw the Jack Frost look-alike standing on the bio-bed with a glare fit to kill on his face and a hypospray in hand ready to throw. Bones stood warily in front of a wall of Doctors and Nurses who were eying the boy uneasily with the remnants of what looked like a tricorder smashed at their feet, obviously a victim of the boy's temper and aim.

Jim was actually a little impressed with the fact the kid could break it by throwing it. Tricorders where made for away missions and could survive nearly anything. Even Spock launching one into a solid rock wall when he'd been a little high on that weird species of tree a few planets back hadn't been able to do much more than dent one.

"Well, looks like someone was having some fun," Jim said with a smile as he carefully stepped between his medical staff and mysterious passenger. "I know it's a little weird waking up in a strange place, bu-"

Jim was interrupted by a little jerk from the boy who hastily mumbled something he didn't catch. "I'm sorry, I heard you but I couldn't understand what you were saying." For some reason he knew that this creature would imitate enough of his Jack's reactions that he needed to make sure he understood that Jim had heard him. This kid though, seemed about a thousand times worse than he remembered his fri—his imaginary friend being.

The kid looked around nervously and bit his lip. Then he opened his mouth and started blurting words that made no sense.

"Not strange… It's… you like it here. Bones yells but he doesn't ever even pretend to ignore you so you like it here… We spend a lot of time here. Bridge is home but this is… second home? Like a tree fort - the safe place and it's not strange."

Jim blinked over at him. "What?" he asked.

"Second home?" Bones muttered with far too much amusement in his voice.

Jim rolled his eyes. Jack (no, the look alike) seemed troubled, his face contorted in concentration.

"Did I say that wrong? Or…oh! I shouldn't have said that! You don't like it when—" he moved forward a little only to suddenly cut off and flinch in obvious pain, hand going to his side. "Oh yeah, there was an ow! What the…. I mean I don't normally…. Wait! Where's my staff!"

Then, as if he wasn't under any threat by the medical personnel he'd been throwing things at with deadly force before and the Security at their side, he jumped down from the bio bed and began examining the space under it.

"It's hurt! Where are you? I can feel you nearby! Hey…come on." He continued on in this manner (even resorting to whistling in a manner reminiscent of Archer calling his beagles for a few minutes) as he searched the room all too thoroughly for anyone who was only marginally familiar with the medical room ever could.

That made Bones nervous and a little angry, which in turn made Jim nervous enough to not wave off the security guards who had been looking on in confusion throughout the entire encounter.

Then Jack started to panic. "No, seriously, where is it? I have to find it! I have to find you! If Pitch finds you…no, wait, Pitch isn't here. Is he? I don't think so. Maybe no one believes in him either even though he sent me here? That's his fear too…right staff? Where are you?" the boy asked getting frantic. He spun suddenly and yelled at Jim, advancing a few steps. "WHERE IS MY STAFF?!"

The security guards leveled their weapons at him, and this time Jim didn't do anything to stop them. Then the boy seemed to realize what he'd done and blinked in confusion, backing away slowly.

"I-I'm sorry, Jimmy. I didn't mean…" He trailed off, eyes darting around frantically as if he was hunting for a way out. "It shouldn't have scared you," came the timid follow up. "No one's supposed to see me. No one can hear me. I don't exist…"

"Bull!" Bones said suddenly, parental fury raging in his eyes as he stepped forward and huffed in the kid's direction. "You do too exist and I never want to hear you say otherwise again, get it?"

The Jack-look-alike stared at them with saucer-like eyes. "B-but…then why? Why didn't anyone talk to me? Why did Jimmy and the moon leave me alone for so long? Why?"

Okay, that last sentence made no sense at all whatsoever. Still, a quick glance at Bones showed that the man was in a full on protective swing. Ready and willing to take anyone down that got in his way of caring for the childlike being in front of him.

"Jim," Bones said with a quiet level of confidence that normally only rang through his voice when he was about to do an exactingly scary bit of life saving or Jim had done something particularly stupid that he had to clean up. "Get the Vulcan to give the kid his toy back. It's obviously a comfort object and I think it would lessen some of the shock he's going through."

Jim turned cocked his head, considering the idea of anything that could be measured as a weapon in the hands of someone as obviously unhinged as this Jack look-a-like before he nodded, conceding the point. "Good idea."

The boy had just eyed them warily, shrinking back until he was practically huddled against the bio-bed, his eyes kept flicking back and forth from Jim to Bones as Jim carefully slipped up to the door and carefully triggered the chime.

"Come in," Spock's answer snapped through the com as the doors slid open. Jim peeked in to look at his first officer, who didn't even glance up from the microscope he was looking through. Jim cautiously approached the table that had a large spread of sciencey, hand held gadgets.

"Jim, I take it you are not here to deliver the scanner I requested Ensign Cartwright bring?"

"Nah, the kid is up, having a complete freak out over his Staff, claiming that it's hurt or something; we're thinking that it's a good idea to get it back to him for a bit until he clams down."

Spock tilted his head up to meet Jim's eyes, "Fascinating." Oh, that was definitely Spock's Expression #4 (I find that exceedingly cool, really, tell me more!) and Jim couldn't help but smirk.

"What's fascinating?" he questioned, raising his own eyebrow. Spock carefully slid the specimen dish out from under the microscope and lying on the glass was a sliver of wood, obviously plucked from the staff.

"Our guest, based on his assertion that his staff was 'hurt,' obviously has some type of link to it and could tell when I took my sample." Jim stared at it, not quite sure what to think.

"What about his clothes, Spock?"

His first officer waved a hand vaguely in the direction of a few other sample dishes. "Since you have not relayed any information about the boy being obviously concerned about them, I am inclined to believe that no such link exists with those items, as I sampled them first."

"Hmm," Jim hummed as he carefully reached for the staff. "Weird. Let's see if we can get the kid to sit down for some more tests later. Do what you can with the sample that you've already taken for now."

Spock nodded as Jim picked up the wooden crook that looked so familiar. He almost gasped as a tangible thrum of energy shot through his hand. He glanced down at the wood, surprised. It felt almost exactly the same as it had when he'd 'picked up' Jack's staff as a child. The nostalgia and wariness that hit him in the feelings wake almost made him physically ache, and Jim turned to head back into the main med bay only to be surprised when the doors flew open a bit too early and Jack darted into the room with a scrambling Bones right after him, both trailed by a Security Officer.

Jim blinked when the staff almost magically seemed to jump from his hands to the boy's he moved so fast. "YAY!" screamed the boy, practically jumping up and down in joy as he actually nuzzled the length. "You're here, I was so scared that something had happened, I can still feel it though, what happened?"

Blue eyes quickly darted around the room, and with that same disturbing nippiness he spotted the shard in Spock's sample dish and snatched that up too. With unerring speed, he found the section Spock had pried it from and gingerly slotted it back in. He placed his hand over the spot and closed his eyes.

Jim wasn't quite sure what he was doing when suddenly the boy's hand, along with some threading areas on the staff, flashed blue for a moment and he opened his eyes again. A quick swing of the staff and the boy smiled at Jim before hoping to sit lightly on one of M'Benga's shelving units, narrowly avoiding knocking over one of the man's near priceless Vulcan artifacts.

Then the white capped head tilted in Spock's direction as if assessing? Re-assessing maybe? For whatever reason the Jack look-a-like seemed to be reconsidering Jim's First Officer. Spock on the other hand didn't appear to care anything about the gaze on him and was staring in rapt contemplation at the staff and the sample piece that looked like it had been magically reattached with not even a line or crack showing there had been a separation at all.

Spock finally glanced up from the staff to the mischievous smirk that was slowly spreading on the white haired boys face and summed up his reaction with the all-encompassing "interesting." Whelp, that was the official sign that there would be no chess nights or literature debates any time soon. When Spock used the word 'interesting' to describe something, everything that could get delegated to his two aides and other department heads was immediately pushed away and Spock all but lived in the labs for the next two weeks at the least. Jim gave in and dropped his head into his hand as he realized how relatively gleeful the Vulcan sounded at his latest research subject, which most likely meant it'd be at least a month this time.

Oh yeah, an upcoming mission dealing with Klingons, a randomly 'magic' kid that shouldn't exist from Jim's past, an entertained to the point of semi-distracting half-Vulcan first officer and Bones in full on parental hissy fit.

He mentally upgraded the upcoming mission and reports to Starfleet from 'sucky' to 'I almost wish this was the Borg.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of notes: THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! :) - end of caps lock over kill.
> 
> A couple of people touched on some fun points that will definitely be brought up over the course of this story, so I can't answer a lot of the question (no reading the diary, spoilers! :))
> 
> 1\. Thanks as always Obi. :)
> 
> 2\. "Colder than a sick Vulcan" - true fact, according to cannon, Vulcans actually have a lower body temp compared to humans, there are people out there on the web that have explained it better then I ever could - I would rec searching for the info, it's pretty cool actually. :)
> 
> 3\. Talosians - Check out the TOS story which originally introduced us to Pike, wicked fun.
> 
> 4\. Why I picked an Ion device - mirror verse, enough said.
> 
> 5\. At the advice of my Beta, switched Timestamps from "Years Later" to "Years After Arrival" - might change it in the first chapter later if it bugs people.
> 
> 6\. Uh I think that's it. I am pretty open if you spot something that I missed or didn't explain well enough.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack gets to know the crew of the Enterprise now that they can talk back, and they get to return the favor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all, please don't kill me for the delay. :)

_90 Years After Arrival_

_Jimmy sat in the tree outside of his bedroom, watching as a drunken Frank threw his beer bottle against Jimmy’s Starfleet poster through the leaves. His tiny fists clenched as he glared at the big jerk._

_The poster had someone that looked a lot like the picture of his father he had found buried in the attic. That’s probably why Frank hated it so much. It was the reason Jimmy had yanked it off the wall near the recruiter place after all._

_“Heh…. I think that we should freeze all his alcohol.”_

_Jimmy glanced over his shoulder at Jack, nodding in recognition to his friend even though he didn’t want to respond to him out loud. Unlike the pale wraith that had been hovering over him for the past year, people could hear Jimmy when he spoke if they wanted to._

_He’d have to remind Jack later that alcohol couldn’t freeze, that it just got colder. Even though he was getting better from the mess he had been when Jim had first hit him with a rock, the spirit had a hard time remembering things besides Jimmy’s name for very long. Jimmy didn’t really mind though. He kept him company, and having to try and keep up with the insatiable curiosity of the ghostly teen helped him find different ways to put things together…and take them apart…_

_Also helping explain to Jack why people--especially the adults--did things taught Jimmy how to watch. It helped him figure out really, really fast that Frank wasn’t as nice as he appeared, even if his Mom didn’t believe him._

_No… it wasn’t that she didn’t believe him. It was more like she didn’t_ want _to believe. She wanted the front Frank put up to be all that there was so that she could trust him enough to leave Jimmy and Sammy with him and run away to space again. Because she did run away. She ran away just like the neighbor girl Jodi did a year ago when she finally got tired of her Dad acting like Frank did when he’d been drinking._

_It was the reason why even though Frank had been “dating” Mom for the six months and they were about to get married, she was at a conference in Paris and not here to see Frank ruin Jimmy’s poster while Sammy stayed at a friend’s house again. Lucky. Jimmy didn’t have any friends to run away to. Why couldn’t he just have gone with his Aunt and Uncle to Tarsus IV? Why did his Mom have to come back to Earth and meet this…jerk?_

_Jack’s gnarled staff started to tap a beat against the tree as the spirit got twitchy from being still for so long, and Jimmy reached out to carefully snag the end of the staff. Keeping careful track of Frank’s movements was hard enough without the beat throwing him off._

_“Aww, come on Jimmy…. Please?” He shook his head slightly but firmly, not taking his gaze away from Frank’s movements. Jack sighed and Jimmy heard more than saw the spirit shift a little in the tree, settling down with a familiarity of living outdoors that Jimmy wished he could imitate._

_It was almost an hour before Frank left Jimmy’s now almost ruined room. He’d have to figure out a new trick to make cleaning his room fun to Jack if he didn’t want his Mom to be mad when she came home tomorrow._

XXXXX

_112 Years After Arrival_

Jim readjusted his posture in his seat in the Officer’s Lounge as he took another sip of his coffee, trying to find as semi-comfortable a position as he could, considering the fact that he’d been in this chair for hours now. He grazed his fingers along his pad, scrolling through the duty roster adjustments that required approval. Why some Department Heads thought it was necessary to plan for things like department wide briefings at the last minute was a mystery for far smarter minds than his. Which, considering that Spock was normally the one that did this when he wasn’t shuffling things off his plate to play in the lab, meant that it was a conundrum that would never be solved.

“Soooo bored, Jimmy.” Jim flicked his fingers, jumping to the Science Department’s roster and he blinked. Huh, only one thing needing approval and that was same day extra time off due to an unexpected opening in the subspace schedule. Jim wondered if maybe he should pay more attention to the reports from his Workforce Management Department. “Seriously, what happened to making it to at least one crew event or something a day? I mean I know a lot of people rely on you but you need to balance it out.” Jim keyed in his code and approved all but one of the schedule change requests (he wanted a little more info on how one of his people was having their 50-somethingish tech issue in the past 2 weeks.)

Once all of that was submitted Jim pulled up the latest information on their relatively quick detour to Starbase 14 to pick up some replacement parts, a backup set of Dilithium Crystals (just in case – Jim had no wish to live through some of the horror stories from the Ambassador), along with the supply dumps for the colonies they were going to.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Jim glanced at the crooked wooden staff that was now clicking idly against his table.

It had been 3 days since the ion device had somehow plopped a being that inexplicably looked and acted just like his one-time imaginary friend in his lap, and the boy was in one of his (thankfully getting rarer) stages where he couldn’t seem to process that people were seeing and/or hearing him. He should have listened to Bones…

Instead Jim, in one of his bouts of stubbornness, had decided that until proven otherwise he would treat the boy like a refugee and passed along orders to that effect to the rest of the crew, who he was determined to get him interacting with more.

Since the boy had been stable enough that morning for a trip to one of the arboretums and the stellar cartography lab, Jim had overrode Bones concerns and taken him on a little sojourn to the Officers’ Lounge once they’d finished up with those. After all, no matter how much Sickbay felt like some type of ‘safe place’ due to whatever he’d picked up from Jim, it still drove Jim nuts to be cooped up and he had a hard time accepting that anybody else was fine with it either, even if they’d ‘had enough excitement for one-day’ as far as Bones was concerned.

According to Bones, it seemed like the boy was adjusting a bit too quickly from what was essentially some type of serious and extended isolation, which in turn pointed to an imminent emotional explosion of some kind, so he’d wanted the kid close at hand back in Sickbay when that blow up happened. Jim had shrugged the thought off, which had turned out to be a bad, bad, thing.

The stares that had followed the boy, the apparent strangeness of Jim trying to get him to eat and the general boringness (the kid’s word, not Jim’s) had built up…

The manic energy that Frostie (Jack look-a-like had gotten too complicated in his head and he had needed something to differentiate this being from his imaginary friend) displayed in fits and spurts when he actually remembered people were seeing him had, just as Bones predicted, exploded.

Frostie had gone from hanging by Jim’s side and poking at the cold cereal and ice cream he’d eventually chosen to eat while asking Jim’s opinion on absolutely everything (even though he wasn’t waiting for answers) to quite literally leaping over a few tables in one bound to crouch on top of the pinball machine, startling the living daylights out of Lt. Carmichel. Jack had leaned at an extreme angle that should have had him falling over, to stare the wide eyed Lieutenant in the eyes (he had looked a little sluggish, now that Jim thought about it, he’d have to check and make sure the Stellar Cartography team was doing okay workload wise).

Then Frostie had quickly grown bored with that and made another near-impossible jump to hang on the low light over the pool table, to finally perching on a table right in the faces of two of his officers that had been having a conversation in spite of their “guest’s” earlier action causing them to leap back in fright, which in turn startled the kid so he leaped again, ending up hiding under Jim’s table before Jim could come up with any type of action plan.

At the time, Jim had tried to get any type of reaction out of the kid only to get a non-reactive blank face with scanning eyes in return. The Captain, never one to admit defeat and go crawling back to Bones unless truly necessary, had merely sighed, called Rand to bring him a padd, and settled in with coffee for the long run. Frostie had popped out from the table to curl up in a chair about 45 minutes ago and was now rambling questions to himself and Jim. Luckily he hadn’t answered any of his own questions yet, which was never a good sign, and also didn’t seem to require a response from Jim because some of the questions were bizarre.

He gave it another five, maybe ten minutes before Frostie started to actually get to the point where Jim could coax him back into interacting with him, at which time he was taking the kid to Bones so he could actually get to the bridge today. While he felt guilty for not being able to help the kid more, he truly hated the fact that he had caused so much pain to someone that looked and acted so much like his best friend and he wouldn’t really have screwed up if the kid was talking again when he turned him over. Right?

And it was not running away, no matter what the little voice in the back of his mind said.

It wasn’t trying to avoid the sometimes desperately sharp words that spilled unintentionally from the boy’s mouth as he brought up private moments he shouldn’t know about or referenced something from Jim’s past that made him have to fight down the aching that tried to consume him or told him truly distressingly embarrassing things about his crew.

Ultimately, this thing somehow knew way more than it should. Mostly about Jim’s life, but there were moments where it seemed like he’d been hanging around the crew, and knew secrets he shouldn’t.

Jim shook his head to clear it a little. The boy’s ramblings were why they were currently alone in the Officer’s Mess even though he knew of at least 3 shift changes currently happening. Too many people had freaked out and now Rand was pointedly steering people away while working on her own pad outside the door. She’d make his life miserable for this, he just knew it.

“Jimmy…..” the voice was tentative, no longer quite as vacantly ignorant as it had been so Jim glanced up at the pale boy. “I… It’s quiet… I don’t like it. I mean… I didn’t mean to scare them away. It makes it so you can hear yourself think, you know?” Jim made a non-committal noise, and the silence continued for a few minutes before Frostie shifted again. “Can we – is there music that we can put on?”

“Sure,” Jim said, now that he had a question that didn’t seem only indifferently directed at him. This was something he could really answer. He quickly pulled up his music files on his pad and some old school jazz starting up at the tap of his fingers.

The boy seemed startled a little at Jim answering his question even though Jim had done his best to respond to the boy when this episode had started before it became obvious Frostie wasn’t recognizing his answers, but the shock was less bad than it had been even yesterday so Jim took it as an accomplishment. He hmmed in thought as an idea came to him, something that could—would seem like… “You know, if you want, we can get a pad set up for you with a bunch of music files. Maybe a movie or two if you like?”

The boy turned and met his eyes, seemingly back with him again, before he answered with a seriousness that seemed to imply a secret that he was sharing for the very first time. “I don’t like movies. They’re not real and they’re too much like before I found Jamie…and you - just watching....” Jim bit back a curse at that. His Jack hadn’t liked movies either, for basically the same reason. This being, there really didn’t seem to be any detail too small that he didn’t have right. Even the mannerisms…

After Jack had stabilized from realizing he could be seen, he’d been a remarkably cheerful, upbeat person, who’d apologized for his shock and behavior 50 times over. He’d been the best friend a kid could have had, even if Jack never really recognized that Jimmy remembered the things about him, either. Almost like he thought he wasn’t important enough to remember.

“Well, that’s not a ‘no’ on music right? What type of music sounds good?”

Frostie tentatively tilted his head. “More of this maybe? And stuff with lots of loud trumpets and horns like the elves used to play. Or pipes like Bunny liked! And that Rock stuff with the singers and lots of beats that Jamie called awesome…” An inquisitive tilt to his head and Jim could see the gears turning as Frostie seemed to try and remember something just like Jack had. It was only a few moments though before Frostie was smiling brilliantly at Jim again, and he had to sigh before dutifully pulling up the music recognition program to build the spirit some playlists as he mentally noted to have Rand dig up a pad that wasn’t connected to the ship’s network.

XxXxX

Jack, to his annoyance, had yet to find a way to sneak past the guards that Jimmy had stuck him with for some reason to get to Engineering. He liked the hum of the engines, since they reminded him of falling asleep to the hum of the mechanics in Bunny’s eggs that he would drape himself over as he watched the rabbit plant or paint or do whatever.

Still, while this one bend in a tube in engineering was his favorite, there were a few other places that Jack enjoyed, one being this slight crevice where a jeffries tube hatch met a curved outcropping. The junction fit him pretty much perfectly, letting him rest there and pretend for a moment that people didn’t see him because he was hiding, not because he was invisible. The other reason he liked it was because it was on one of those routes that was just enough of the beaten path that people didn’t mind talking as much, so he could overhear a lot of information.

Like the “who’s going to get accidentally married next?” pool (Kirk and Spock were leading again).

Or the special knock to get into where Engineering kept it’s still (not that Jack wanted to drink that, he heard that it could knock even Bones for a loop).

Most of his fun for this hiding spot however, was negated by the fact that his two current guards were holding up the walls on either side of spot, so people were getting quiet around them. Basically all it left him time to do was think.

Which was something he honestly had trouble with these days. It was, strange, he guessed. He remembered vaguely that he used to be better at that. Thinking, processing stuff, talking to other people correctly, all of it.

He couldn’t really even remember when it had changed, when he had changed. When this kaleidoscope of colors had painted over his mind and his thoughts turned into flittering fairies that darted away from his grasping hands. When the others, the Guardians, turned into something that felt more like a dream than anything else.

It was like flying, like he could do once. Well, he believed he could, was sure that he had once danced through the skies, with the wind a comforting partner, laughing until he was breathless, but in the deadened air of the ship, he could hardly breath it seemed. Or like snow. He remembered snow days, and snowball fights, and a pond that remained always frozen...but here, snow came on schedule, and there was no comforting flurry to lean against and let it whisk him to the stars.

No, he was stuck on Earth, and Earth wasn’t even Earth now, but a ship, even though he could move like it was Earth.

Jack knew, that he had been more once, on an Earth that was different. Been someone whose icy storm could turn back the darkness, but now, he’d poured everything he had into the sky more times than he could count and he had never gotten anything back. It just kept taking from him. It took his voice, until he decided to say everything that came to mind just to hear something that reacted to him, because not even the wind acknowledged Jack anymore.

Jack remembered that it did once. That the wind and the snow, and the trails of golden sand, and sometimes other things would move or react.

That he could interact with them.

That he existed.

Now it was so hard and took everything he had to move something, to do more than lay there and let the oppressive nothingness of the world press in on him. He’d also remembered it being, easier, maybe around Jimmy when he was younger. When he’d talked to Jack and listened to the stories that Jack could remember (though maybe he made up a few things to cover the gaps that were lost in the paint river that ran through his mind these days.)

But then, he’d stopped existing to Jimmy too, eventually.

But currently, currently lots of people could see him, even if habit told him they couldn’t until something happened to remind him. Maybe, maybe he was some type of apparition that locked on to Jim and that’s why he can’t remember anything else. But, no… That doesn’t make sense because he can remember things without Jimmy in them. But maybe those are just the stories that he filled in the blanks on…

No.

Jack’s mind might not be as organized as a workshop right now, but he knew, he knew that he existed before. Maybe he just had to remind Jimmy to get himself back, because that was how he existed right?

Other people made him exist.

Jack grinned. And now he had a bunch of people that could see him. Well, they said they could, but they were Jimmy’s crew…. soo… He needed to test this further. He grasped his staff and darted into the hallway, laughing.

XxXxX

“Come now Captain, I can hardly agree to release a set of Dilithium Crystals to you when your set is fully functional and we supply two full quadrants.”

Jim really wanted to glare at the pointy haired civilian official in charge of Starbase 14. “I believe that you know our mission is to the Border Worlds, and that your office acknowledged our full list as available and ready for pick up when we first transmitted our requisition forms. Are you saying that your transmission was incorrect?”

“Now, Capta-”

“Jimmy!” Kirk barely managed to avoid being completely bowled over by an exuberant, barefoot teen in Starfleet blacks complete with staff that had the ion device hanging from it and two highly exasperated Security Officers trailing behind him.

“This is great! Everyone can see me!” Jim sighed and patted his head, ignoring the indignant squawking from the teen. The teen was even more puppy like than Chekov sometimes.

Frostie should also not be on the station, which is why as the white haired boy started to babble away about a little girl that he ran into on the trading deck he eyed the Officers over his head and they grimaced appropriately. They were so on KP duty.

“Captain,” Kirk turned and looked at the official who was now eyeing Frostie and him apprehensively. “May I ask-”

“No,” Jim spat out. The man bristled and Jim wanted so badly to tell the man it was classified, suck it. But the guy was already against him and Jim didn't even want to know how this looked, he really didn't. No matter what the situation with Frostie was, this guy didn’t qualify to know and as such, all the guy had to go off of was an obviously lower tech kid that was a bit too pretty in Starfleet blacks being babysat by Jim’s Security.

He could hear Pike’s aggrieved sigh from here.

Jim flat out used the distraction to bowl over the officials further objections and if he sent Pike a short wave “sorry for the complaints you’re going to get,” well, no one needed to know but the two of them.

XxXxX

Chekov carefully eyed the plate of cookies that Jack was holding out to him. They had been experimenting with different activities for the teen to help him acclimate to people, and he’d surprisingly jumped at the chance to bake something. (The Captain had just shook his head, and Chekov figured it was something to do with the imaginary friend this creature had taken the form of.)

He tentatively picked one up and even more tentatively took a bite. Chewing slowly, it took a moment for the taste of the cookie, something with cinnamon, to wash over his senses, and when it did, his eyes widened and he quickly scarfed down the rest of it and grabbed for the plate. Jack pulled the plate back with a laugh and darted over to Sulu to hold it out again. The pilot, who had been watching them with a smirk snagged a cookie and happily munched on it.

"These are delicious!" The pilot got out the moment he swallowed, and Chekov nodded in agreement as he eyed the plate, running scenarios around in his head on how to get it from the teen. Given that Jack had managed to sneak onto the bridge with his staff and the cookies, well, it would take some doing.

"Thanks! Phil taught me to bake and I loved it! And this recipe has almost no sugar so even Tooth liked them." His face got a little sadder, but picked up again into a stubborn, nostalgic grin, "I made these for Jimmy too, when he was younger."

There was a bit of an awkward silence for a moment, and just as Chekov was trying to figure out how to prod Sulu into saying something, the turbolift doors opened, causing Jack's lightning quick attention span to turn to it. The boy grinned widely and actually jumped over the empty Captain's chair to present the plate to Uhura, who looked slightly taken aback at having cookies shoved at her first thing when she came on shift. Uhura quickly recovered however, graciously taking a cookie and thanking Jack with a smile, who beamed as she munched on it and ruffled his hair.

XxXxX

Cupcake (and yes, he had finally embraced the moniker Cupcake, to his exasperation it was probably never going away) rather calmly looked over mess that was the main rec room. The tables and chairs had all been pushed to the sides, and an inordinate amount of pillows and blankets were currently creating what was actually a pretty impressive fort. The was also a makeshift pirate flag hanging from the side. To avoid heckling, Cupcake moved around the makeshift “wall” created with mess trays to the apparent entrance, which was a section without any trays.

He got halfway between the wall and the fort when a voice called out, “Halt stranger! Identify yerself!” Was that really?

“Commander Giotto?” He asked, really hoping he had misheard the voice.

“Ack, it be Cupcake.”

“Ensign Corranth?” Wasn’t she assigned to-

“Uh, I thought Cupcake was pretty cool though…”

“Frostie. Suddenly this makes a bit more sense,” Cupcake stated with a sigh. The teen was just as good as the Captain at turning the people that should be guards into ‘playmates’ (though how he had gotten the rather serious Giotto, one of the few non-recent Academy graduates on the ship and the Chief of Security to do this he really didn’t want to know) and he’d only been working on them for a few days. It had taken the Captain nearly two months.

“Uh, thank you?”

Cupcake turned to the Klingon Scrabble Club that was still hovering uncertainly by the door. Maybe they’d settle for the Forward Observation Deck if he and a few other Security Officers helped move in some of the bean bags that they kept around for movie nights even though they had this room booked.

XxXxX

It was a slightly horribly hidden secret that every once and while, Kirk and Spock would randomly decide to play chess in the Officer's Lounge rather than in one of their quarters and suddenly, all the officers that weren’t on duty or otherwise engaged in something would appear to watch. Since neither man spent too much time in the Lounge, they didn’t know that the crowd was that unusual, or if they did they didn’t comment on it.

This time had the added amusement of their latest guest, Frostie, making a near constant rambling commentary that went over pretty much anything and everything, and frequently caused the Captain and First Officer to break into debates of their own, which sufficiently distracted them enough that the teen was able to sneak a snack from the assortment that the two had set up near their board.

The normal ‘chess pot’ pot nearly tripled when they started adding in things like how many times Frostie would get Spock to say “fascinating” and the shades of red in the face the Captain would turn when Frostie spilled embarrassing stories.

(The crew really wanted to know why even mentioning the word ‘pepperoncini’ caused the Captain to flush scarlet, and they were really tempted to break the ‘we’re all here on break’ facade to beg Jack to explain the ‘thing with the bananas, nail polish, and pennies that had you banned from Argos.’)

Then someone started quietly passing around the really good stuff, and next thing anyone knew the crew somehow ended up singing old Christmas Carols with Jack while Jim conducted in a Santa Hat and Spock played guitar (“not a Vulcan lute, but my mother enjoyed it.”)

Doctor McCoy, who had wandered in looking for the Captain, took one look at the scene and promptly turned around, muttering something that sounded vaguely like “not enough alcohol in the universe.”

XxXxX

Spock stared at Jack over one of the tables in the lab. Despite what Jack thought, those ‘puppy dog eyes’ as Nyota had dubbed them, would not work on him. “At this point and time, Mr. Frost,” he ignored the muttered, half hearted ‘it’s Jack,’ “at this point and time we will not be finding a way to make the ion device smaller.”

“But it throws off my balance when I’m running!” And the puppy dog eyes gave way to whining, and Spock felt much the same urge to sigh as he occasionally had around the Captain.

“All the more reason to keep it large, if it prevents you from moving at unadvisable paces through the hallways when Security has already fielded several complaints.”

“But I’ve always done that! It’s not my fault they can suddenly see me and that I can run into them now rather than go through them!”

He would not sigh again. He would not….perhaps he should send the boy to Jim.

XxXxX

Jim hummed quietly as he flipped through the latest batches of reports on his padd as he sat in sickbay, waiting for Bones to finish whatever he was doing in his office so they could hit the gym. He gave it a week before the Doctor finally gave in on their bargain. Bones would join Jim for a workout four times a week if Jim stuck to a diet Bones designed on those days. For the most part it wasn’t too bad, but Jim had had to watch Frostie tearing through sundaes and scrambled eggs covered with lots of toppings, and see his crew eating the massive amounts of incredible smelling baked goods the teen turned out, so he was feeling a little vindictive at the moment.

It wasn’t like Bones was out of shape, and he definitely passed his physicals and other qualifications, but that didn’t mean he could keep up with the pace Jim had the tendency to set for himself. Which in all fairness only Spock, Sulu, and the top 10.246% of his security could.

His humming stopped however when Bones finally left the office, since Bones had that ‘things are going to be okay, I promise’ look that he only got when things were serious. Lt. Michaels seemed to draw some reassurance from it though, as he shook Bones hand and thanked him.

“It’s what I’m here for. Let me know if you have any other questions on what they say, Peter. I know that medical jargon is tough, even when it’s not being chopped down for subspace transmissions. My door is always open,” Bones said and the Lieutenant nodded before turning and jumping a bit when he saw Jim, who made sure that he had his ‘trust me, I’m a Starfleet Captain’ look on (which despite Bones’ insistence WAS different than his ‘hi, I’m a Starfleet Captain, want to see my ship?’ look).

“Lt. Michaels.”

The man smiled back, and Jim felt a little pleased at that. “Captain.”

“Not asking why, but if you need additional sub-space bandwidth, just send the requisitions in directly to me and I’ll approve them. I think we might also have a 2 and a half minute slot on our next real time communication window,” Jim stated with a nod, and the man’s smile really brightened at that.

“Thank you, sir. And it’s okay, I don’t mind sharing, it’s just my little girl back on Earth, she’s been having night terrors, bad enough that my wife had to take her to a specialist. Her brain scans are a little funny but they’re not sure what’s wrong. It’d be great to be able to see her and tell her I love her.”

Oh, that explained why Bones was in extra strong ‘it’ll be okay’ mode. The thing probably reminded him of how much he missed Joanna.

“Definitely sounds like a good reason to take up some sub-space bandwidth, Lieutenant. I’ll get you added to the real time slot, and send me the reqs with what you need on the bandwidth.”

“I’ll do that. Thank you again so much, Captain,” The man said and shook Jim’s hand profusely before saying goodbye to Bones and leaving sickbay, at a brisk pace, probably to go fill out the forms in triplicate….

“Thanks, Jim. That’ll mean a lot.” He glanced up at the Doctors tone, it sounded, well, a little dire. “Patient confidentiality, and all that, but I’m not impressed by what was sent. It either got cut down more viciously than usual, or the poor little girl’s Doctors have no clue what they’re dealing with.”

Jim’s eyes narrowed. Bones didn’t normally say anything bad about the other practitioners of his profession if he could help it. Maybe he’d talk to Uhura about squeezing out another couple of minutes.

“Want to go change while I got the basics of this set up? I’ll even go easy on you and we’ll only do 5 miles.”

Bones glared at him, before huffing back into his office while Jim smirked. He quickly went over to the wall panel and triggered the intership communications, “Kirk to Uhura.”

“Uhura her-NO PUT THAT DOWN FROSTIE DUCK SCOTTY!!” Jim blinked. He had never heard Uhura shout like that. Uh…. Maybe he’d just call the on duty officer.

XxXxX

An hour and a half later Jim was enjoying his cold shower as Bones muttered about the dangers of locker room space fungus from where he had collapsed on a bench to the side of the showers. Being the Captain had a few perks, and one of those was a larger than normal water ration.

Nothing felt better after a workout than a cold shower. Kept his heart rate up and the chill compressed his muscles, preventing the buildup that caused soreness the next day. Honestly, Bones was a Doctor, he should know this stuff. Jim grinned, and ducked his head under the spray one last time and gave his head one last vigorous rub before reaching to turn off the water. The shut off valves kicked in perfectly and Jim was just stepping away from it to grab his towel when the last few drips of gathered water froze.

What the heck?

He quickly grabbed his towel and wrapped it around his waist, both for coverage and for the fact that a deep chill swept the room, icing over the water clinging to his skin and hair. “Bones, we need to move, now.”

He turned to face his friend who was already moving at the sudden chill. Then, suddenly the doors to the locker room flew open as Frostie rushed in, laughing maniacally. “Hide me, Jimmy!”

“Dunna think even the Captain can save you laddie!” Scotty yelled as a war cry as he moved after the darting teen, (and that was Scotty underneath all the pink paint… where had that come from? and were those sequins? And feathers?) and in a rather slapstick manner the two rushed around the room, circling Jim and Bones. The situation was only made worse when Frostie’s guards rushed into the room, both of them picking up the Captain’s state of undress and promptly blushing and stammering out “Sorry sir”s.

“Out!” Jim managed to choke, needing to get everyone out of the room before whatever environmental control failure was happening froze them all, but Frostie obviously didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation as he laughed and used his staff like a poll vault to jump over the Security Officers and bolt back through the gym. Scotty shoved through the officers on his way after the kid. The Security Officers gave sharp nods before bolting after them again, and Jim was grabbing Bones’ arm to drag him out too when all of a sudden the temperature rose sharply back to normal, causing sharp tingles along his extremities.

Jim and Bones looked at each other, and Jim used the opportunity to throw on some pants and grab his gym bag before the two left the locker room. Jim used his Captain’s override to seal the room pending maintenance review. The last thing they needed while this close to the border was issues with their environmental controls.

XXXXX

Ensign Rolanda Mathers stood outside the Botany Gardens, clutching a bag of clothes to her chest and she most assuredly did not stomp her foot in frustration even though she really wanted to. She had been practically all over the ship looking for their current guest, the being they had decided to call Frostie (but she heard that he only occasionally realized that they were talking to him when they called him that, and that he called himself Jack Frost, so she would have to ask him which he preferred).

After the teen had mentioned the last away team’s brush with death, they had combed over the sensor readings and decided that he most assuredly had been there. Which meant that she hadn’t been imagining things. Someone, for all intents and purposes--most likely the teen she was currently looking for--had gotten her out of the way of the boulders that would surely have crushed her, killing her quite painfully. The least she could do, she figured, was say thank you.

And also get him some decent new clothes.

All the various science departments had finally finished their tests on Frostie’s clothing, but the pants especially were so threadbare and patched that they hadn’t really stood up that well to the procedures no matter how gently they were handled. By the time they were handed over to her she could hardly see how they were better than the Starfleet blacks that he was currently running around in. Especially the pants, which needed mentioning again since they had been so old that they’d practically been rotting, and the people that had been testing them had no idea how they were still holding together for the kid to wear.

Thus, Rolanda had made it her personal mission to take care of arranging new outfits as a kind of thank you/sorry we made your clothes worse. One of the other people on that last away team, Lt. Ishida, was part of a sewing circle that made commission off duty clothes for people, and he’d gotten his whole group involved. They’d done a fabulous job repairing and reinforcing the blue and silver sweater, then making five new shirts and three new pants from a sturdy, long lasting fabric she’d managed to get from the quartermaster along with pieces of several donated items that other members of the science teams that had done the testing and the away team had chipped in.

After them deciding that there might be sentimental reasons involved for hanging onto the same clothes for so long, she had gotten them to incorporate pieces of the previous clothes as decorative patches and designs. Ultimately, Rolanda was pretty happy with them.

Now if she was just able to deliver them.

After whatever had happened yesterday, something that witnesses refused to elaborate on (except with shudders, and mutters of ‘poor Scotty’), Frostie had apparently been put on even more restricted access, but that apparently hadn’t stuck. One minute he was supposed to be in the Rec Room, then the mess, then the gym, no wait, the Officers Lounge….

Ugh. She was a Geologist, not a bloodhound.

“Hello.”

Rolanda was willing to admit that she may have jumped about a mile into the air in surprise at chipper voice sounding out right behind her. Thankfully she didn’t drop the clothes since when she turned around the person who had spoken was in fact the person she had been looking for. Frostie was looking decidedly smirky at her jump, and she was half tempted to go off on him, but based on what she had heard from the grapevine, it seemed he really was just a bit of a prankster and likely hadn’t meant any real harm (whatever yesterday was was still up for debate, however).

Instead, Rolanda smiled at him. “Hello, I’ve been looking for you.”

Frostie tilted his. “Yup, that’s why I’m here.” There was an awkward silence for a few moments as neither could decide what to say, before finally, Rolanda gave herself an internal ‘you can do it!’ and held out the package containing the clothes to the teen.

“Here these are for you.”

The boy blinked for a moment, before hesitatingly reaching out to take it. “Thank you?” he sounded a little unsure and Rolanda refrained from smacking her forehead. Way to be random, girl.

“You’re welcome.” She said with a bright grin. “Uhh, I’m Rolanda, you saved my life a little bit ago, I hear.”

Frostie nodded, keeping his eyes glued to her as he held the bag of clothes tentatively.

She forced the grin to stay on her face. “I, ah…. well, I’m a Science Tech, see, and so even though it wasn’t my area when I heard they were finished testing your clothes, I volunteered to give them back to you, which, okay, was really an excuse to come say thank you for saving my life, so thank you. And for the clothes, I’m really sorry, but they didn’t completely stand up to testing so-”

“Wait what happened to my clothes?” Frostie, who had honestly been staring at her wide eyed after she’d hit her stride, suddenly panicked. Before she could clarify, with a scared sounding whine he started ripping at the bag the clothes were wrapped in.

“They-” she tried to say, but before she could finish, the bag (how in the heck, that was a industrial strength grade bag?) ripped in two, and the clothes scattered to the ground. The teen made a slightly keening noise as he dropped into a crouch beside them, his staff almost (almost, but still strangely gently maneuvered) falling to lay next to him, his hands frantically moving through the pile on the floor.

Rolanda dropped to her knees, hovering nervously, not sure what she could do to help or if he would even understand her explanation right now, and she vaguely heard the Security Officers that had been hovering a way back call for Doctor McCoy. Oh man, she really hadn’t meant for anything like this! Why couldn’t she make more sense when she was trying to explain things!

Frostie found the original sweater and clutched it to his chest with one hand, the other still frantically moving through the clothes, like if he looked just a little further he would find the pants. Rolanda, with a deep breath, placed her hands on either side of the pile, trying to make herself seem as nonthreatening as possible, and leaned over just a little bit more so that her face was in his eyesight. “Do you see the patches? Those are what’s left. We gave you as much of it as we could when we made the new ones, I promise.”

He froze, looking at her, as if not quite seeing, and she took another deep breath, and risked slowly moving one hand to straighten out one of the pairs of pants, so that the full, curling strip of the original pants that started at one of the pockets and wrapped around one leg several times to where it ended where it was worked into a bright gold, embroidered snowflake, that was near the hem of the black capri length pants. They’d really tried to match the style of the boys sweater.

With a trembling hand Frostie reached out and almost petted the fabric, staring at it, transfixed. Being very careful not to move too quickly to hopefully avoid startling him, Rolanda carefully spread out the rest of the clothes so that they showcased the bits of the older pants and linen shirt that had been worked in. She sat there with him, not minding that it was long enough she vaguely noticed Doctor McCoy arriving to stand near the Security Officers.

After a while, he finally looked at her again, and Rolanda made sure to grin as reassuringly as she could. “I’m really, really sorry. I should have phrased things better. We really tried to make the clothes as close to your originals as possible, and every piece has something of yours, and something of ours.” He glanced down at the clothes in what she could only call wonder. “See the gold thread?” she pointed to the embroidered snowflake on the original pair of pants, and Frostie nodded. ”That came from my top, and this zipper here,” she pointed to the one at the neck of a shirt that could be worn collared or zipped up like a turtle neck, “it’s from Mark’s favorite jacket. We felt really bad that we couldn’t give them back to you, especially since we knew the Captain told you they’d be okay, and we know they were some of the few things you had, so we tried to make up for it as best we could.”

Well, they might have been able to, just the clothes wouldn’t have lasted long, if at all, with the way their sample pieces and other tests had compromised the already unstable structures. Not that he needed to know that.

He looked away from the clothes on the floor, and carefully moved the sweater he’d been clutching to his chest down a little and drew in his other hand to trace over where the additional fabric layer they’d sewn onto the inside was visible, and where some other patching had been blended into the top layer as carefully as possible.

“Thank you.” Frostie said, finally meeting her eyes again. “I’m sorry that I freaked out.”

“It’s okay. I’m still sorry that the clothes got more ruined than we thought would happen, and that I couldn’t explain things very well initially and made you worry.”

Frostie nodded, before moving to start gathering the clothes, and Rolanda quickly jumped in to help.

“Also, just in case it got lost in my ramblings before, I really, really am thankful that you saved my life before.”

Frostie looked up at her. “You’re part of Jimmy’s crew. Nothing can happen to you, period.” She grinned at that, if only.

“By the way, do you like Frostie, or Jack better?” His head snapped up again, and Rolanda nodded to herself. “I know most people took after the Captain and are calling you Frostie, but I figured that if you saved my life, the least I could do is call you by whatever name you prefer, no matter what anyone else says.”

He looked at her curiously for a few moments, before a smile that seemed somehow just a bit more real for all that it was smaller. “I like Jack. It’s my name and I miss hearing it. It’s me.”

She smiled as she stood up, balling up the ripped bag in one hand (she’d have to requisition a new one for him, or maybe have one of the others do it to avoid pissing off the quartermaster) before holding her hand down to help him balance the clothes and the staff as he stood. “Then hello, Jack, it’s nice to meet you.”

XxXxX

“Blandly mother

takes him strolling

by railroad and by river

-he's the son of the absconded

hot rod angel-

and he imagines cars

and rides them in his dreams,

so lonely growing up among

the imaginary automobiles

and dead souls of Tarrytown

to create

out of his own imagination

the beauty of his wild

forebears-a mythology

he cannot inherit.

Will he later hallucinate

his gods? Waking

among mysteries with

an insane gleam

of recollection?

The recognition-

something so rare

in his soul,

met only in dreams

-nostalgias

of another life.

A question of the soul.

And the injured

losing their injury

in their innocence

-a cock, a cross,

an excellence of love.

And the father grieves

in flophouse

complexities of memory

a thousand miles

away, unknowing

of the unexpected

youthful stranger

bumming toward his door.”

Jack smiled as the calming intonation from the Poetry Clubs current reading. While the Botany Gardens didn’t have any big trees with branches that he could sleep on, they did have some nice hedges he could curl up in, so he really liked it when they met there. The only better place was when they got the Observation Lounge, since it gave poetry under the stars a new meaning. Now that people could see him, doing the things that he had used to do sometimes got a little awkward, but he’d been willing to put up with it for Ginsberg.

He remembered liking Ginsberg’s flowing words before, and now, though the loneliness in them occasionally made him sad, it brought a comfort to him that he hadn’t had in a while. They hadn’t changed, between one world and the next.

“Um, Jack?” He glanced up, and saw one of the sergeants that regularly attended, Elizabeth, he thought her name was? He should know. She was using his name, after all, and not that nickname people had been calling him. Not that he had anything against nicknames normally, but he wasn’t entirely dumb even if he wasn’t at the top of his game. This nickname was a way for people to avoid calling him him, Jack Frost. “We were wondering if you wanted to join us for lunch, we brought plenty of sandwiches.”

He couldn’t help displaying his shock at that. “Really?”

She nodded.

“I’d love to!” he leapt out of the hedges with a grin. This was the first time, aside from Rolanda, that some had come looking for him and invited him. He promised himself to be on his best behavior. After all, if he did something that made everyone mad at him, he might have trouble keeping an eye on them on the away mission to the planet later today. They could see him to avoid him now, after all.

XxXxX

Jim sat poised on the edge of his chair, carefully eyeing the planet on the view screen. Bodalar was the first planet on their cover mission, and as much as Jim loved infrastructure reviews (he actually really did), he really didn’t like dealing with the endless politicking that went with them. Seriously, if people just shut up and explained clearly what was working for them and what they were having issues with it would make life so much easier.

It wasn’t like they were grading them on how well they were doing establishing their colony, they just wanted to make sure that they had sufficient supplies and that their Emergency Preparedness everything was sufficient to handle their current needs. Still it always turned into hints at needing this, at how awesome they were, or how Jim should recommend them for entry into the Federation already, or excuses as to why some such system wasn’t at peak efficiency.

Not pleasant…

Especially since he’d have to put up with that on top of keeping on top of the check ins with Spock on the sensor sweeps they had started, looking for signs of that cloaked Klingon Vessel. Not that he minded all the science speak too much, it was just combining science speak and political wrangling….

Very not pleasant…

“Sir, we’ve completed arrival procedures, and coordinates have been confirmed for our first landing party,” Uhura chimed.

“Great, Sulu, you’re with me, Chekov, you have the con.”

Jim and Sulu strode to the turbolift to Chekov’s rather chipper “Aye, Keptin.”

He looked at Sulu after the doors had shut and he’d called out for the correct deck. “Did someone let him have caffeine again? I thought he was still banned.”

Sulu rolled his eyes. “Frostie, some type of handmade chocolate covered espresso beans…”

“Ahh… Any left?”

Sulu grinned. “I confiscated them since he gave them to Chekov.” Jim scowled, so basically no way that he was getting his hands on them. Not even four rounds of his baking in and the Enterprise’s gossip chains knew that whenever Frostie baked, you wanted to be there because it was awesome.

He and Sulu chatted about a few random things as they made their way to the transporter room, where the rest of the landing party: Rand, two security, three operations, two sciences, and one medical, were waiting. Frostie was standing by Rand, humming slightly and using his staff to tap out a beat. There was something about him that seemed slightly off, not that Jim could immediately place it. She nodded good bye to him and moved onto the Transporter Pad with the rest of the party. Frostie looked a little confused as Jim waved too, but he figured that if he had any questions about where Jim was headed the teen’s security would be able to address them within the range of what they could disclose.

Really, he should have known better than to make assumptions about Frostie’s thought process. He really, really should.

Jim’s eyes barely had a chance to widen as suddenly a thin form in Starfleet blacks jumped away from his security and literally leapt across half the transporter room to end up blue eyes to blue eyes with him ON HIS PAD as the hum from the transporters hit its apex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please C&C... I'd love to know how people felt about the OC.


End file.
